Nothing can make you feel like an underachiever like a news story about a five-year-old girl who managed to save her mother's life after a horrible crash. Yup, I don't see this item as a source of inspiration, but as something to undercut my own life achievements. According to The Montreal Gazette:

LUNDBRECK, Alta. – Nikki Butler has always known her five-year-old daughter Mary was special. Now she’s calling the little girl her hero.

Mary and Nikki Butler of Lundbreck, about 200 kilometres south of Calgary, were travelling through the Crowsnest Pass when the mother’s truck hit a patch of black ice. It slid across the road, hit a guardrail and flipped four times down a steep embankment.

Once the vehicle came to a stop, the girl saw that her mother was bleeding from a gash on her forehead.

She had also lost consciousness.

Mary tried to wake her, but there was no response.

“She didn’t sit beside me and cry,” said Nikki, 30.

“Somehow, she knew she had to do something, so she got help.”

The mother says the five-year-old unbuckled her seatbelt, climbed through the rear passenger window of the truck — which was caved in above where the child was sitting — and climbed 45 metres up the steep, rock- and snow-covered embankment to the edge of Highway 3.

She threw her arms in the air and flagged down the first vehicle she saw, which happened to be a sanding truck.

“She told (the driver) her mom was in trouble,” said Nikki, who’s recovering at home after spending six days in Calgary’s Foothills Hospital after the Oct. 13 incident.

“We were so far down the hill that he didn’t even see us. No one would have seen us. I can’t even imagine what would have happened if she didn’t go for help.”

Nikki had her broken arm repaired with steel plates. Her broken nose was rebuilt, a smashed cheekbone repaired, and she received 200 sutures to close a cut from ear to ear across her forehead. She fractured several vertebrae in her neck.

She doesn’t remember the crash.

“All I know is I hit black ice and woke up in hospital three days later.”

After she was released from hospital, Nikki visited the crash site and walked down the embankment to where the truck landed.

She struggled to walk back up the hill and is “baffled” that her young daughter was able to make the hike on her own.

Nikki asked Mary days after the crash why she did what she did that afternoon.

“She said, ‘I needed to save my mom because I love my mom.’ ”

Mary sustained two bruises on her hips in the crash, her mother said.

Man, I can barely walk through Griffith Park without wheezing.

Okay, fine, this story is heartwarming, that girl deserves mad props, and I want her to watch over me on my deathbed.